Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 375. 

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not so typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host certified life coach Angela Kelly. 

Well, hello, my empowered principals. Welcome to March. I want to start with a quick announcement before we head into today’s show. It is March. There are only three or four months left of the school year, depending on how late your school year goes. But you are in the last trimester of the year. This is the last season of this school year. It’s the spring season.

So first of all I want to invite any aspiring school leaders or brand new hires. If this is your first time in school leadership or you are applying to become an administrator. If you have recently been hired I want to invite you into EPC this spring, right now. It’s the perfect time to join if you aspire to get hired as a school leader for the upcoming school year because I will be offering trainings on how to get hired, how to be the person who gets hired.

And the more that you are around school leaders, when you join EPC, You’re going to be surrounded by like-minded school leaders. You’re going to be in the conversations. You’re going to be at the table. And the more that you identify as a new leader, whether you’re aspiring or just getting hired, the more aligned you will be to landing that ideal job in your school leadership position.

Okay, so new school leaders that just got hired, listen up. You will want to join EPC now for two reasons. Number one, you’re going to feel pulled in all kinds of directions because you are still in your current position and need to fulfill your role through the end of the school year and you’re going to be compelled to dive into your new position as leaders. Because people basically expect you to start leading the day you get hired, even though you’re in another position.

So it happened to me. I was actually felt like I was working two jobs. So you are going to be pulled into planning meetings. You might be asked to go to the leadership meetings, but you still have to fulfill the role so you can tidy that up and put a bow on it and hand it over to the person who’s going to be taking over for you. And you’re going to want to get caught up on all of the happenings in the new leadership position.

So it’s very likely that the overwhelm is going to build up quickly. Your district leaders are going to want you to be planning for next year. So your brain has to be thinking about how to wrap up this year. And you have to be thinking about 3 to 6 months ahead of the game for your next year. So your brain’s gonna get very overwhelmed and it’s gonna build up really quickly because you’ll be split. Okay? I can support you with this. I have done this personally. I’ve helped other people through it.

Springtime is a busy time anyway. This is the perfect time to join EPC and you’ll be in for the full year. So if you join in the spring, you’ll have all the way until next spring and then you can just join in again and keep it rolling. But there’s going to be a gap in the skill set that you have now and the skill set that you need to become a site or a district leader, depending on where your new position is. That’s totally normal. The gap is normal. You’re not supposed to have all the skill sets in your new job that you had in your old job. That’s normal.

So it feels a little discouraging at first. You’re going to be new, you’re going to be clumsy, you’re going to be clunking around a little bit and feel very insufficient. Okay, that’s normal. Don’t beat yourself up, but it can be really discouraging.

Okay, so I’m going to be hosting the Spring Training Series this month throughout the month of March so when you join EPC you get access to all of those resources all of the trainings. If you’d like to wait until the summer to join EPC, you can purchase the Spring Training Series as an a la carte option for $555. So you can purchase the Spring Training Series when you join EPC by September 1st and apply the $555 credit towards the registration price of EPC.

So EPC cost $1997 for the entire year for all the trainings, all the coaching, all the bonus one-on-one sessions and you get to apply the $550 as a credit and you will only end up paying the $1442 remainder for the entire year of EPC. So it’s such a great deal.

Okay, all of you new leaders, all of you aspiring leaders, this is the perfect time to join because this is the time where all the HR stuff is happening, getting hired, transitioning from your old job to your new job. It’s so exciting. It’s so fun. You want to be an EPC.

All right. Today’s show is an excerpt from the Relationship Mastery Series I hosted last month. This was a three-day program that covers all things relationship. Relationships with others, connection during conflict, and relationship with self. It was pretty epic, if I might say so. And you can purchase that series, the whole replay and the booklets that come along with it for $222 and again if you buy Relationship Mastery and you watch all the replays and you love it and you want into EPC, you can use that $222 as a credit towards your EPC membership when you’re ready. Okay?

So today’s excerpt is from day three of the Relationship Mastery Series, and I’m sharing the concept of your two voices. You have two inner voices. Most likely you’ve noticed them. They’re probably talking to you. You have two of them and they’re opposing most of the time.

There’s one that tells you, dream big, do the things you want to do, be happy, go for it, everything’s going to be fine, Don’t worry. It’s the voice that cheers you on. It’s the voice with your deepest dreams and ambitions and desires. It’s the voice that feels good when you actually tune into its sweet voice. This is the voice of truth. It’s the voice of our heart and our soul. And it’s the voice that tends to get drowned out by the other voice in our head that’s kind of like the louder, more aggressive sibling. I call it the voice of fear.

So on one shoulder you have the voice of truth and the other is the voice of fear. And the voice of fear, for some reason, always gets the megaphone. It’s always fighting to be in the driver’s seat. It wants to tell you all the reasons why you can’t do this or you shouldn’t do that or you won’t do that or you’re not capable or you’re too lazy or you’re not good enough. All the fears. And it’s trying to protect you.

But it goes on and on, and it’s really loud, and it’s really annoying. And there needs to be an approach to being able to listen to both of these voices so that you know when to listen to which voice. Because there’s a purpose to both voices. It’s not like you just throw your fears away and only listen to one side. There’s a reason you have a voice of fear. And I talk about this in this excerpt of the Relationship Mastery Day 3 Training.

It is imperative to build an understanding of these two voices and their purpose in your life so that you can proactively choose which voice you want to follow because each of them do play a very important role and they have an impact on your life and your career. So enjoy this clip and if you’re interested in the Relationship Mastery Series you can purchase it with the free link that’s in the show notes. Have a wonderful week.

The beauty about this course relationship mastery is we get to pause, we get to reflect and contemplate, we get to rewrite the script, we get to change the course, change the trajectory of what it means and looks like and feels like and sounds like to accept ourselves, to love ourselves. Because when you are accepting of you and all of your little humanness, all your little quirks, all your little faults, all your little imperfections, so you call them, all of those things, that little package, when you can get 10% more kind, a little bit more forgiving, a little bit more trusting, a little bit more compassionate.

That fuel, when you start looking at yourself and that fuel, you will also start accepting others because what you’ll realize is that when you can accept your humanness, you can also understand other people’s, which connects you in relationship with them. It’s understandable when people lose their marbles and go off the deep end because they’re so upset and passionate. It’s understandable. It’s relatable. When we see it in ourselves, we can see it in others. When we can accept our humanness, you can allow other people to be human. Your relationship matters, the way you think about yourself, the way you speak to yourself. Because this, I really want to drive this home.

The way you feel about yourself, the emotions that come up when you’re thinking about yourself, when you’re like, ugh, or ugh, just all of it, all the internal loathing, scowling, disappointment, embarrassment, shame, all those icky feels that we feel sometimes when we’ve messed up or we’ve been told things about our bodies, things about our actions, things about who people think we are, our character. When we feel that way, that feeling, those emotions in you, it is fuel. It is energy. That’s why it vibrates. It’s energy in your body. You have an emotional sensation that’s occurring in the body. It’s a vibration and it can be, it’s like I think of like radio waves, right? It’s really low. It’s kind of humming in the background.

It’s like, you know, when you go to a restaurant and there’s ambient, you know, music playing in the background where you, if you tuned in, you could hear it, but you don’t really hear it, right? You’re not at a concert versus you go to a concert. You turn the volume up to 100 and that’s all you’re focusing on the voice in your head. It might be low in the background, but it’s still playing. Or it might be on full blast. But the fuel, how you’re feeling about those thoughts, you turn up the volume too. The louder the thoughts, the louder the feelings. And when the feelings get more intense and that energy is in your body, that is when it impacts the way that you treat people because it’s the fuel.

So it’s like this, when you are at home and something’s gone wrong at home and you’re just all flustered and you got into work late, you can go into somebody’s classroom and still be in that energy and you might snap at them or be more critical about their teaching or like picking on something that you normally wouldn’t even say anything. But that energy’s got to go somewhere because we didn’t acknowledge it, we didn’t validate it, we didn’t release it, we didn’t process it at all. Okay, now I’m at school, I’ll think about home when I get back home. We didn’t do that because we weren’t self-aware, so the energy comes with us.

So when we don’t feel good and we criticize ourselves, we’re criticizing others. Because criticism is what is fueling your actions. So what I have learned about what to do with all of this, the resistance of the acceptance and wanting to accept myself but feeling like I can’t because it’s too selfish, uncoupling all of that. I’m like, what is going on here? And this is when I saw it. We have two voices.

Now, this is not new. You’ve heard this. Some people will say like, well, I’ve got the devil on one side telling me to do all the naughty things and the angel on the other side telling me to do all the good things. We see that portrayed in movies or in books and whatnot.

But the way that I hear the two voices in my head is the voice of fear. So there is a voice that is fueled by my emotions of fear. When I am feeling any kind of fear, the voice that I hear is the inner critic. It’s the judgment. It’s the criticism. It’s the fear of insufficiency. It’s the fear of rejection that’s fueling my thoughts, fueling my energy. It’s fear.

Oh my gosh, I’m not good enough. Oh my gosh, what if they don’t like me? Oh my gosh, am I worthy? Oh my gosh, am I capable? Oh my gosh, am I even accepted? Am I going to win or lose, succeed or fail? Do people want me around? Do they respect me? Fear. What if, what if, what if?

We focus on the failures. We focus on the insecurities. We focus on the imperfections. And that voice of fear is that inner critic. What happens here? And what about this? And what about that? You’re not good enough here. Remember that time you failed? And it just keeps on reminding you and reminding you and reminding you. Remember when you failed at this, remember when you did that, remember you acted a fool. And this voice will run the show every single time if we allow that fear to be the fuel. And what this voice, I believe is doing is it’s speaking up. It’s trying to be critical in the weirdest, it’s trying to be helpful in the weirdest way possible by being a critic, because it’s trying to motivate you or protect you. But what it’s really trying to do is avoid the pain of insufficiency, the pain of embarrassment, the pain of others not liking us, the pain of rejection, the pain of disappointment, painful emotions, uncomfortable emotions, emotions we don’t enjoy feeling.

This voice is doing everything in its power to prevent you from putting yourself into situations where you might have to feel rejected. You might have to feel embarrassed. You might have to feel a disappointment. You might have to feel heartbreak. You might have to feel the burn of failure, the agony of defeat, right? So this voice is telling you, I want to protect you and keep you safe from these painful emotions. So I’m gonna criticize and judge and I’m gonna kind of distract you over here and do a song and dance about, focus on these people, focus on them liking you, focus on you know criticizing yourself. Let’s just stay in this area because at least it’s a zone of comfort, at least it’s safe.

And so when we’re reacting to that fear in the name of motivation, in the name of discipline, that’s how I used to frame it. Oh, I’m just being disciplined or oh, I need a little kick in the pants. Need to get going here. There’s a difference between giving yourself loving feedback, and giving yourself jerk feedback. Like really mean, like terrible feedback just to think it’ll, it’ll feel so bad that eventually the pain will be too much. And I’ll finally get out and get to the gym, or I’ll finally get out and write that book, or I’ll finally get out and do the thing at work that I needed to get done.

And sometimes it does work. That’s why we keep doing it. We have intermittent success with harshness and criticism. And it might motivate us temporarily or it might give us the discipline we need to get something done, but it doesn’t feel good. The whole time doesn’t feel good. So the next time our brain’s like, well, I’m not doing that again. And so we avoid even harder. We go even further around the block. We like take a bigger detour.

But what we don’t understand is in the attempt to avoid criticism, to avoid rejection, to avoid embarrassment, disappointment, we are doing those very things to ourselves with our relationship with ourself. We are rejecting us instead of accepting. We’re criticizing us instead of comforting, right? We are critical of ourselves versus being constructive with ourselves and supportive. We’re being dismissive versus embracing.

We are actually doing the very thing that the fear voice, the voice of fear, is most afraid of. We’re just doing it internally so nobody can see it, Which is why we would be mortified if we somebody saw the way that we talk to ourselves or heard the way we talk to ourselves and treated ourselves.

We’re hiding, we’re trying so hard to hide our imperfections and our failures. I watch myself do it all the time, especially with AI. Now you can like touch up your skin, touch up your face, touch up your photos. You could literally create a totally different human. And we do that with our photos for our physical body, but we do it in the way that we present ourselves.

And we have a persona, we have a facade that we put out there to hide the imperfections of our humanness, emotional imperfections, mental and, you know, mental, like thoughts, imperfect thoughts. Like we hide past mistakes, like judgments, decisions we’ve made that might not have been super in alignment with who we are now.

And we end up playing small, playing safe. We don’t go for big goals. We just kind of do what we’re doing now, which is just getting through surviving and celebrating some superficial wins or celebrating the ones that are comfortable enough to celebrate, because we don’t want to look too big for our britches. We don’t want to look like we love ourselves too much. We don’t wanna look like, you know, we’re tooting our own horn because society makes that mean you’re selfish, you’re a narcissist, you’re egotistical, you’re self-absorbed, you don’t care about other people, all you care about is yourself. All or none thinking.

So we get that feedback from people and we’re like, whoa, we disconnect. We disconnect from them, we disconnect from ourselves. There’s a disconnect, the relationship disconnects and we hold ourselves back. And then what do we do?

We go home, we get in our minds, and we worry. Anxiety, worry. What are people going to think? What did they say? What should I do? What shouldn’t I do? Okay, that society doesn’t like that I am too tall, what am I supposed to do about that? Society like that I’m too short, I’ll wear heels. Oh, society thinks that principals should be servant leaders. Okay, I’ll be at work 24 hours a week. Oh, now they’re telling me self-care. Oh, I guess I’ll try and get some sleep. Oh now they’re telling me that we need to do this. Okay, I’ll do that over here.

Have you noticed that? Society is always changing the rules about what’s in what’s out. What’s cool? What’s not what we should do, what we shouldn’t do. Education is we’re famous for following trends versus creating trends that are consistent with human development. We are in the business of human development. And when we’re listening to the voice of fear, what we’re doing is we are focusing on how it appears versus who we are. And life doesn’t respond to what it looks like, how it appears, the facade, life, people, the experience that we have, it responds to who we are on the inside.

You can hide the fact that you don’t have a healthy relationship with yourself. I’ve tried for decades to be good and kind and generous to all the people and then come home and be mean to me. But what happens is the truth of who I am on the inside is energy. And that is our experience. So you can go out there and everybody could like you and you can kiss up and people please and placate people and do everything everybody asks you to do and so they might be happy, but your experience isn’t happy. You’re not happy. And then you live a life from beginning to end, trying to people please, never feeling genuine to yourself, never honoring the relationship with yourself, never valuing what it is that you want, how you want to feel, what you want to experience, what you would like to contribute to the world in your way, because we’re focused on how it appears versus who we are inside.

Unfortunately, I have observed that that’s how most people live, on the frequency of fear, listening to the voice of fear. But there’s another voice. Thank goodness.

Another frequency we can tune into. It’s like an AM radio, right? You can be on this frequency 96.5 or you can go up to 101.3. Tune into another frequency. This is the voice of truth. It’s when you’re alone by yourself and you’re dreaming about your desires, about your goals, about your dreams, about your thinking back to the wonderful Christmas and New Year’s you had and you’re reminiscing those memories and they already are nostalgic because they’re already memories. Or you’re thinking about the future.

You’re thinking about maybe you’re starting a family and you’re daydreaming about the love you’re going to fill with that little bundle of joy, or maybe your child’s graduating college and you’re sad and happy, you’re so excited to see them spread their wings and your heart is breaking because they’re leaving the home. But it’s the voice of truth. It’s the goals that you have the experiences you want to create. The person you want to be, have you ever been like I wish I was. I actually had somebody hire me and he said I want to be the James Bond of school leaders. He had a vision of who he wanted to be, a vision of his identity of who he wanted to be. He dreamt of who he wanted to be, but he didn’t feel that way. So he wanted that appearance, but it wasn’t who he was.

So we had to actually create an identity for him so that he could feel like he was the James Bond of school leaders. But there is a knowing in you. There is a voice of truth. There is a compass, a GPS system. It’s that intuition or that gut feeling some people will call it. It’s the body saying to you, hey, this is where I want to go. This is what we’re destined for. This is what we were born to do. There is a knowingness. It’s clear. There’s clarity to it. There’s truth. And there’s leaps of faith.

I literally just moved from California. I’ve lived in California for 30 years. I have loved every minute of it. I will even take their traffic. I will even take the eight-year drought we had. All of it. I loved it. And after going through a very significant life change, I had a knowingness. I didn’t know where I was going to land. I didn’t know when.

I couldn’t, there was no answer until my son called me one day and said, “Mom,” he had moved to Nashville about 18 months prior. And he said, “Mom, I think you’re going to love it in Nashville.” And I was like, I couldn’t fathom leaving my beloved California, but there was a knowingness in me. There was something in my gut that said, “Yeah, go. Your son’s there. Go be with him. California’s not going anywhere. If you want to come back, come on back. We’ve got you. But go play. Give it a year. Go have fun. Try new things. Go explore. Start a new chapter. Write the adventure. You are the screenwriter of your story. You are the main character.”

And here I found my son coaching me on how to live my life. And I’m a life coach. And he said, “Mom, I’m going to say what you said to me. California’s not going anywhere. If you absolutely are unhappy, you can always go back. Give it a try.” This is exactly what I said because he was agonizing over what to do with the move. Should he stay in LA? Should he move up? You know, he wanted to go to the Pacific Northwest, but didn’t really know anybody up there. He just didn’t know what he wanted. I said, “Just pick, pick it and stick it.”

So one of his best friends was moving to Nashville and said, “I think you should come with me, Alex. Give it a year.” Alex has been here 18 months. I’ve been here two months and it has been the adventure of my life. I had a knowingness, even though I know nobody in this city other than my son and his roommate, that’s it. And the people at the coffee shop down the street now.

There is something in your body that tells you follow this path. And you’re like, “That doesn’t even make sense. Follow this path. Are you sure?” That’s what school leadership was. “You should be a school leader.” “Oh, no, that does not look fun. I’m not doing that. I’m going to stay right here. And my little kindergarten room in my instructional coaching room. No, thank you.” “Be a school leader.” There’s a knowingness.

And when you listen to the voice of truth, the truth, the clarity, the guidance system inside of you, there is an acceptance with this. The voice of truth, it’s very loving. It’s very kind. It’s gentle. It’s patient. It will wait for you. While you bounce over and listen to the voice of fear, oh, and you freak out, this one, voice of truth is always there patiently waiting, nothing’s gone wrong.

But when you do listen to this voice of truth, there’s an alignment. It just clicks. This is awareness. This is alignment. And from here, the voice of truth, you gain momentum. So when you’re acting in alignment with the voice of truth with yourself, you have this like duality of relationship where you have this relationship with fear, and you have this relationship with truth.

But when you’re with truth, the truth of who you are, you’re a little kinder to yourself, you’re more accepting of your humanness. You can laugh at your or celebrate your imperfections a little bit. You know, you know you, you can laugh at that a little bit. You can just embrace it, celebrate it.

Your imperfections are your, they just equal differences and those differences are your talent, your skills. It’s who makes you who you are. I think about people who have physical, what people would say is not normal, the average human body, right? Whether that’s in size, shape, mobility, cognitive ability, physical ability. The human body comes in every way, shape or form.

And for the people who were born with a different, less than average, not average shape, size, mobility, whatever, they became inventors. They invented ways to live life. People who have had accidents and lose their legs or lose their limbs, people invented materials for those people to embrace life. If it hadn’t, if everybody all had two legs and then something happened catastrophically, we would not have anything in place.

So for all of our differences, they become creations. Our differences are how we become creators. The reason that I can be a life coach, a certified life and leadership coach for school leaders is because of all of my imperfections. I was a terrible principal for a long time. And I say that with love and appreciation and gratitude.

If I hadn’t been so awful and so strung out between my personal life and my home life, I wouldn’t have reached out to get a life coach. I wouldn’t have created this awareness. I wouldn’t have ever applied these tools to education and to school leadership.

And from that, I created programming for school leaders. That’s unlike anything anybody else could ever offer you because I was put on the earth to create it.

How can I not love that? How can I not appreciate that gift that I was given? And all of you have it too.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit angelakellycoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 373. 

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not so typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host certified life coach Angela Kelly. 

Well, hello, my empowered principals. So happy to be here with you today. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast.

I want to dive right in. This is going to be fairly short and sweet. I was coaching one of my clients and we got into the topic of her to-do list. And I want to invite you, as you’re listening to my voice, to take a moment and think about your to-do list.

I’m sure that no matter where you are, whether you’re in your office or you’re on a walk or you’re driving or you’re listening to this and you’re far away from work, you can visualize your to-do list. Is it on your calendar? Is it on your desk? Is it on your computer? Is it in a notebook? Is it on a notepad? You know exactly what it looks like. You know exactly where it is. You know the pen you use to write with it. You know the to-do list intimately because you are so connected to it and involved with it every day.

Okay. Now think about that list and I want you to tell yourself what the purpose of that list is. What is the purpose of your to-do list? And if you think about it, for most people, a to-do list is a list that captures all of your thoughts. There are thoughts about things you need to-do, things you need to complete, things you’d like to get done, things you hope to get done, things you feel pressured to get done. And the to-do list captures the thoughts from your brain and puts them onto paper or puts them onto your computer screen.

So a to-do list for most people is simply a brain drain. It goes from the brain onto paper and this action that you’re taking going from brain to paper it’s a task or it’s an action line that I recommend everybody take, particularly if your head is spinning and your head is trying to hold all of that content in your memory, right? So the list is what helps you capture everything in your brain and it puts it down onto paper. And I’ll say paper, whether it’s computer, digital, or actual pen and paper, but it’s a placeholder for those thoughts.

It’s a placeholder for your desires, things you want to-do, actions you want to take, projects you want to complete, conversations you want to have, appointments that you want to make and then meet, people that you want to connect with, all of the things, right? Personal appointments, professional appointments, meetings, observations, conversations, check-ins, picking up your kids, getting over to the dentist, getting your best friend’s birthday present purchase, planning your husband’s birthday party, calling your mother, talking to your sister. I mean it’s on and on. This is why we create to-do lists because our brain wants to explode with all of it swimming up in our mind.

So the to-do list captures all of it and puts it down on the paper. I just call this a brain drain. So most people have a to-do list and it’s a brain drain of all the things that they want to-do, need to-do, would like to-do, feel like they have to-do. Okay? And the beautiful thing about our lovely brain is that as soon as we drain it out, there’s a moment of like, ooh, that feels good. I think I got everything. And then a few minutes or a few hours later, it fills back up. It’s like the cup that never empties. It will fill up the cup again with all new kinds of thoughts and things you need to-do, or it will recycle the water that was in the cup before and fill it back up with the same thoughts.

So you look at the list and you’re still thinking about the same things that are on the to-do list. And so we either add more things to the to-do list. Oh, I forgot this. Oh, what about that? Or we think further into the future. Okay, I’ve got this month covered. Now, what about next month? And then wait, what about six months from now? And all of a sudden, our to-do list is growing longer and longer and longer and longer. Now this to-do list might be helpful. It might give your brain some reprieve from trying to hold and memorize and remember all of the things you want to-do.

So it can give you some relief, but it can also, when you look at it, especially if you’ve been adding on and adding on and adding on, or you have the same things come up on your list over and over and they’re not getting done. So it either feels really good to be getting the things done and to getting it out of your brain, or it feels like crazy stress every time you look at it and it brings up anxiety, stress, worry, doubt, fears, resistance to having to get it all done. But the to-do list in and of itself tends to be simply a placeholder. And it doesn’t do a lot more than that as it stands, than just as a to-do list. Okay?

But what do we love to-do? We love to put things on the to-do list and then go do something that’s on the list and then check it off or cross it off. It’s incredible how addicting that is. Something as simple as checking a box or striking a line through that task. Have you ever done this? I’ve done this so many times. I did something that wasn’t on the list. So I wrote it on the list so I could write strike it off the list. Have you ever done that? It’s so crazy satisfying. I don’t know why, but something as simple as a check mark or a cross out, it feels so good. So good that we keep creating a to-do list.

But I want to go into the to-do list problem so I can help you create a to-do list that actually is productive. Because look, some things are on the to-do list day after day after day after day. Work out, work out, work out, work out, take a walk, take a walk, take a walk, take a walk, call a friend, call a friend, go to bed early, eat healthy, you know, whenever, get your newsletter done. There are things that are on the list that we’re like, we have such good intention, we really want to-do them. And then we don’t, and they’re on that list on repeat over and over, but we don’t really question it, why we’re not doing it or it shouldn’t be on the list. So there’s that. And then there are the things that we just keep adding, hoping that they’ll get done because they’re on the list.

Have you ever done that? Like, so we either get the things done on the list or we don’t, and they tend not to fall off the list. And the ones that we do get done, we feel super good about it, gives us this great big wave of dopamine, and we feel very productive on the days. The thing that we put on the list, it got done. We feel good about it. We get to cross it off the list and then it’s over. And then we look at the other things that were like, oh, and then the list feels bad again. Have you noticed that?

So because we stop at brain draining the to-do list, which is just like blurting everything out onto paper from your brain, here’s everything I need to-do. We blurt it all out and then we just leave it there. And it’s this kind of jumbled mess. It has no rhyme or reason. It has no value assigned to it. It’s just there. But when it’s on the list, everything feels important. Everything feels like a priority because it’s on the list.

I want you to consider the purpose of that list. Why do you create a list? And how do you feel about your to-do list? This really matters. Some people look at their list and they feel great about it. They know the purpose, it serves its purpose, it’s productive, they use it efficiently and to create the outcomes that they want. Some people, the to-do list is all they need to get things done.

So ask yourself, how do I feel about my to-do list? When I’m looking at it, does it feel good or does it not? It’s very clear and it’s very simple. You don’t have to make this complicated. It’s either going to generate feelings of like calmness, clarity, certainty, like productivity, or it’s going to generate feelings of anxiety and stress and doubt and worry.

So if your to-do list doesn’t feel good for you in any way, shape, or form, then it’s time to change the way that you approach your to-do list and leverage it in a way that maximizes your productivity and that feels good for you. So the to-do list is simply the very first step of proactively planning your productivity.

And what happens for a lot of us principals out there is that we don’t want to-do the remaining steps of the planning, which includes prioritization, delegation, and calendaring. We don’t want to-do that part. We don’t like it. We think it’s going to take too much time. We get stuck in indecision. We complicate it by making everything a priority, and we don’t want to delegate. We don’t want to give things up, and we don’t want to have to calendar it because it feels like now it’s set in stone and we get all squirmy if an emergency comes up or something happens and it’s on our calendar and then we didn’t do it.

When we don’t honor our calendar, there’s a feeling of disappointment or a feeling of guilt. We feel kind of guilty if we don’t honor what we ourselves put on our own calendar. Can you see it? Okay. So just notice how much emotion comes into play when you interact with your to-do list. The emotion is the biggest part of it. I know that sounds like insignificant but it’s the most significant.

And I teach an approach in EPC for task management that’s efficient and productive. And the technique itself, the process that I created, it’s not really rocket science but it does take the to-do list to the next level and the next level and the next level. It goes much deeper than just blurting everything out and doing a brain drain on a piece of paper. The technique itself is not rocket science, I promise you.

However, coaching your mind and managing your emotions around your to-do list and all the tasks you need to get done can feel like rocket science when you’re in the moment. Managing your time, managing your energy, managing your interactions, managing how much effort you put into a task or how much time you’re going to give to a task or what you’re willing to delegate, what you’re not willing to delegate.

The amount of time you spend just thinking about your to-do list but not doing the to-do list. Think about the minutes that you spend just thinking about the to-do list or looking at the to-do list or worrying about the to-do list or wondering how you’re gonna get the to-do list done. We spend so many minutes at work contemplating about the to-do list versus prioritizing it, delegating it, calendaring it and let’s go right.

It’s the emotion that’s holding you back or the fear of some anticipated emotion in the future. That’s holding you back. We have a lot of thoughts and feelings around delegation, around prioritization, around calendaring, around honoring. And we also have a lot of thoughts and feelings about the obstacles that come up. Things like interruptions, emergencies.

Now look, if everything is an emergency, if every single day you’re having emergencies and putting up fires, they’re no longer emergencies. We have a management problem. So there are true emergencies and there is a need for interruptions at times. But we tend to use them as an excuse, as the reason why we can’t calendar, we can’t plan, we can’t prioritize and delegate.

We think that school leadership is so full of emergencies and interruptions that it’s impossible to actually plan and honor the calendar. But I’m here to dispel that myth. What makes time management, balance management, planning management, what makes all of that so difficult are the threads of emotions and thoughts that we have and the relationship that we have with time, the relationship we have with ourselves, the relationship we have with others.

Those get intertwined into our ability to take a to-do list from a brain drain and prioritize it. And what can we delegate? And what can we constrain? What can we say no to? What can we put on the back burner? And then what needs to be on the calendar this week, next week, and then three months from now. And then when it comes time to-do the thing that we’re set out to-do, do we honor that? Do we actually do the thing when we said we would do it?

Are we in a relationship with ourselves where we have our own back, where we are honoring the very thing we said we wanted to accomplish. That’s a whole another level. This is why you can get the best time management system in the world. You can get the prettiest journal and planner. You can have multiple calendars on your computer, but if you don’t follow them or honor them or take the time to plan them proactively and really build up that relationship with time and planning, there is no system that will work.

There’s nothing external that you can implement that’s going to help you feel better around your time and to build a better relationship with your time. Okay? So in March, I’m going to be hosting my annual Empowered Principal Spring Training Series. I’m gonna teach how to develop a plan for the last months of school, all the testing, all the celebrations, all the graduations, all the promotions, all the end of year, yada yadas, all the hip hop hoorays. In a way that feels manageable and enjoyable for you.

Enjoy the end of the year, whether you end in May or you end at the end of June. Enjoy the last two months of the year. Don’t run yourself ragged. There’s a way to prep and plan for that now and to delegate more than you ever thought possible and to actually be present and enjoy the celebrations of the end of the year and looking at the accomplishments, focusing on what worked, focusing on all the hard work and the effort and acknowledging it, validating it, celebrating it, versus running on empty, not sleeping, overworking, overexerting, overscheduling yourself back to back, not eating, not getting any rest, feeling like you can’t even comb your hair, you know what I’m saying? Making sure that your shoes match, right?

So I hope you’ll join me in March. I’m going to be covering all things time management, planning management, balance management, but I’m also going to talk about the things that come up in the spring. March and April are heavy hitters with HR stuff. Things like making staffing decisions, how to tell people that you’re letting them go from a place of authenticity and love, and then how to hold space between the time that you tell them and the last day of school.

Because very few professions have this where we tell an employee, “I’m sorry, we’re not going to re-select you for employment next year, but we’d really like you to give it your best for the next three months, even though you know you’re not coming back to our place of employment. Have a nice day.” Yet here we are in education, having to tell people in March that they’re no longer reelected for next year. And then please do your best and get through testing and celebrate the end of the year and don’t be sad. Be happy and please do your best between March, April, May, and into June. Thank you so much for your service. Goodbye. That’s how it feels. We have to hold space for that.

Ourselves, for them, and the embarrassment or the shame or the frustration, whatever they’re feeling. So there’s how you’re feeling about it. There’s how they’re feeling about it. And then the whole staff has an opinion about it. So how to hold space gracefully for all of that. We’re going to talk about that in the Spring Training Series.

I have developed a very authentic, gentle approach to navigate this so it feels more comfortable for you, for them, and for everyone around you. And if you want more, come on in to EPC. You can get started right away at EPC. Doors are open in March. And the link to register for the Spring Training Series.

And by the way, when you join EPC, you get free access to all of my trainings, all of them. And I teach them in EPC. So you don’t have to-double down on your time. I will cover these concepts in EPC, but I also do trainings for people who are not in EPC who just want to a la carte purchase specific trainings.

So you can purchase Spring Training, you can purchase the Mastery Series, you can purchase HR stuff, you can purchase Emotional Regulation. I have the Mastery Series all separated out. You can purchase them a la carte. You can purchase them as a bundle and just join EPC because you get the best value. It’s only $19.97 and you get access to everything.

So for those of you who are new to me and you want to try something out, you can do a la carte or if you are ready to dive in, you get a full year into EPC for one price. Come on in, we can’t wait to meet you. Love you so much, thank you for the work you do. Have an amazing week. Talk to you real soon. Take good care. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit angelakellycoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader. 

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 371. 

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not so typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host certified life coach Angela Kelly Robeck. 

Well hello, my empowered principals. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to February. Here we are, trucking along, getting through that winter. I know for me, I am freezing here in Nashville. We have had extreme cold, as you’ve probably seen on the news if you don’t live in the South. It’s been colder here than my home state of Iowa. We’ve had more snow. It’s pretty wild. So I am adjusting and I am doing my best to embrace sweaters and sweatpants and warm socks and my Uggs and lots of layers and hot tea. So may you be warm wherever you are in the world.

All right. Today I’m going to talk about a topic that is very, it’s raw, it’s personal, it’s near and dear to my heart. And what I love about the work that I do is I create from a place of experience. The topics that I bring up, the work that I offer, the services I offer, the coaching that I provide, the content, the coursework, the programming, everything that I have created in my business and in the services through the Empowered Principal, they’re all founded in my own personal experience.

That is the only way that I can know that they work because I’m the one who experiences it. I’m the one who tests it. I’m the one who tries it. I find out what works. I find out what doesn’t. I do the workbooks and the workshops myself. I’m integrated into the work that I do with my clients. And I am always studying myself. I’m studying my brain, I’m studying how I feel, I’m noticing the resistance, the limitations that I have in my mind, and I work on them actively so that I can provide you with very real authentic perspectives and things to consider and alternate thoughts to think and using your emotions as your compass and leading your school in a way that feels very authentic and aligned to who you are.

Because you can take these tools and you can apply this coaching and you can customize it in a way that no matter what your values are, or what you want to prioritize, or how you feel, or how you want to feel, or the accomplishments you want to achieve, or the goals you’ve set for yourself, or the experiences you want to have in this lifetime, it works no matter what. Because you plug in your experiences, your thoughts, your feelings, your desires, your dreams, and you implement them in a way in your life that will translate into the same outcomes. Meaning, feeling more fulfilled, feeling more balanced, feeling more relaxed, feeling more empowered, feeling more fulfilled, more joy, and really loving and appreciating the opportunity to be a school leader and to have the balance and a full life outside of school leadership. To be one human who loves what they do while they’re at work and loves their life outside of work.

That’s what this is all about. We are in the business of human development, as I say. That’s what education is. It is the business of human development. And we don’t stop developing when we graduate from college and obtain that teaching credential. We will continue to develop until our last human days on the planet.

And this topic is near and dear to my heart because it’s happened to me in my own life personally and I have deeply contemplated this because it was such a profound impact on my life, on my identity, on my psyche, on my mental and emotional wellness, state of wellness, and I’m offering it to you here.

Now, of course, this is going to be like the outline version of it for the podcast. I’m actually diving deeper into this into a new program that I am offering coming in March. I’ll tell you more about it. It’s the Spring Training Series for School Leaders through the Empowered Principal Program. It’s a separate standalone program. So if you are not ready to jump in and join EPC, which is the full school year program, you can give this a try. It’s an eight session program that I’m going to be teaching live through the first two weeks of March. And I’m covering all things related to spring. So all of your HR, all of testing mindset and empowerment and creating a relaxed and confident environment for your testing, talking about hiring, firing, letting people go from love. We’re going to talk about setting things up for testing, and then we’re going to get into how to enjoy the last eight weeks of school. There’s a lot of celebrations, a lot of events, how to not get overwhelmed and overworked and overexhausted, how to learn how to delegate like a boss and enjoy and actually celebrate the end of the year, how to reflect and contemplate on what you’ve learned, how you’ve grown, the accomplishments you’ve created, really acknowledging and validating yourself.

And then we’re going to get into what I call vision forecasting, which is future planning, looking ahead, designing the experience you want to have. And finally, we’re going to talk about leadership identity. So it is a full program. There is a lot of content in these eight sessions that we’re going to do.

And I will have our producers put the link to register for that program in the show notes. And if you have any questions at all, feel free to just reach out to me on Facebook or Instagram or email, angelakellycoaching@gmail.com. You know where to find me and I will be happy to set up a phone chat with you and answer any questions that you have. Or you can ask them your questions to me directly on social media. So happy to connect with you in any way that’s most comfortable for you.

So let’s dive in to being blamed as the villain. As a school leader, there are going to be people who consider you to be the villain in their story. You’re the bad guy or gal. They’re going to blame you as the reason for their unhappiness, their discontent, their dissatisfaction.

They are thinking that you are the reason, whether it’s your decisions or your actions or your energy or just because you’re on the planet, because you’re in the position of authority, you must be the reason why they are not happy. Or that you’re the reason why life is hard for them, or they’re not feeling the way they want to, they’re not accomplishing what they want to. 

People get upset about master schedules, they get upset about the class list, they get upset about test scores, they get upset about the copy machines, they get upset about the number of copies, they get upset about the timing of meetings, they get upset about the content, the topics of the meetings, professional development, they might be upset about how long the maintenance waitlist takes or the technology people take, they might feel that you’re pressuring them to perform. People will have all kinds of thoughts and they like to focus their discontent towards the leader.

Now, this especially applies to the spring season because in spring, you know what happens. There is a lot of staffing conversation going on. This is the HR season for you. You are wrapping up observations, you’re having those evaluation conversations and post-observation conversations. You’re giving people administrative feedback and evaluative feedback. You’re making decisions about if somebody’s going to go on an improvement plan, if somebody’s going to be satisfactory or not, if somebody is going to be returning or not, or if somebody is going to be reassigned, you’re making a lot of staffing decisions and those do impact people. And when you make decisions that impact people, it is very easy for them to believe that you are the reason they are unhappy with your decisions.

Okay, so they’re going to be upset about performance reviews or tenure, getting tenure, not getting tenure, being invited back, not being invited back. Being reassigned, as I said, if there’s staffing changes, maybe somebody’s coming off of leave or somebody’s going on to leave or there’s, you know, just the numbers aren’t going to hold, you know, you’re not going to be able to have four third grades next year or you’re not going to be able to have five people in your English department and you need to downsize or you need to shift somebody around, right? They’ll get upset about that. Sometimes they get upset because somebody else is being moved around. Their best buddy got moved or reassigned or isn’t being asked back. And they’re just as upset about that as they are if it were happening to them.

Now, especially if you are a brand new principal, if this is your first year at your site, even if you’re not a brand new, but if it’s your first year at a site, this is their first go around with you in the spring season so they’re not sure what to anticipate and they can be very nervous. And they also see that there’s usually a lot of staffing changes happening at the site administrative level. APs, principals coming and going, getting reassigned, people at the district level, central office level, coming, going, getting reassigned, that kind of thing. So there’s a lot of nervousness around employment, around staffing.

So be aware of that if you’re brand new, it’s coming. And if you’re, this isn’t your first rodeo, you already know what’s coming. And you’ll want to be able to navigate that. This is one of the major things I’m going to be covering in the spring training series for school leaders.

So if this is an area you are interested in learning more about and feeling more confident and feeling more assured of yourself and your decisions and working on how to navigate and hold conversations without you freaking out and going into fight or flight, remaining calm, remaining assured of yourself so that you can hold space for those conversations. We’re gonna be talking about that when it comes to all things HR, staffing, firing people, hiring people, holding space that awkward time between when the day you tell somebody they’re not coming back and then they weirdly have to work and try to perform at their best for the next two or three months.

It’s crazy. You tell them in March they’ve got to work March, April, May, sometimes into June before it’s their last day of employment. So we’re going to talk about that. But there is a lot of spring fever anxiety that comes up.

One, they’re really nervous about their evaluations. Two, they’re nervous about staffing and employment, understandably so. And three, for the people who are in testing grades, usually grades three and up in elementary and then obviously middle and high school, kids are all testing. State testing, you know, season is coming and people get very anxious about what they’ve covered. They’re trying to cram it in. They’re trying to really hammer it in for the kids and test prep starts and people start getting a little irritable and school feels a little less fun for everybody during this season. So there’s a lot of tension in the air when people are nervous, when people are unsure, when they don’t understand what’s happening or why it’s happening or just the unknown of how the kids are going to perform and what that’s going to reflect on them as teachers.

Okay. So all of this energy is going around in the spring. There’s excitement because it is spring. You got spring fever, you have spring fever behaviors, both in students and adults. And then you have this nervous energy around HR stuff and around, you know, the testing window.

So I just have to say, this kind of energy, this really high buzz, but also anxiety driven, very anxious, worried, doubts, fears, all of it’s coming to the surface, it’s intensifying. This is why I have the dream of making the type of coaching that I offer, this empowerment coaching, a mainstream practice for everyone in our schools.

Because I’m starting with school leaders because you’re such a pivotal position within the district, right? You’re the ultimate middle manager and you have the capacity to create impact and a ripple effect up and out to your staff, students and community and also up towards your district.

So can you imagine if this type of coaching is available to everyone on campus, it’s part of professional development, personal development integrating into professional development, which becomes a mainstream practice for everyone. So once a person becomes aware of how to step into their personal power, and be able to maturely regulate and manage their emotions, their emotional state, and their reactions to their feelings, and they’re able to access empowerment through awareness and alignment, your teachers are going to feel so much more control over their professional experience in their career.

Paired professionals, support staff, if they had access to this knowledge, they would be able to regulate, they’d be able to make decisions from a more empowered place. Is this the right job for me? Is this the right school for me? How do I want to show up? I want to be the best version of me as an employee. What does that look like? What training do I need? Let me take responsibility for my career and ask for the things I need, get into alignment with what feels good and collaborate, get on board and coach myself when I am in resistance or when I do feel like I’ve hit an upper limiting belief.

Right. I can just imagine the difference in schools when adults have access to this type of coaching and this type of conversation and this type of content and information. It’s going to be so incredible when you as the leader are able to integrate this work into who you are and to model it for your teachers and eventually, I promise you, it will come in the Empowered Principal programming to extend this out to staff and students.

For now, we’re starting with site and district leaders because those are the people who make decisions about the vision, the future, the approach that we take, the mindset that we embody, the vision of who we’re becoming. So this work starts with us, always, internally first, in order to have it work its way into reality, into the existence of the program and of the vision that you have for your school.

So this is why people think that you are the villain. Number one, they don’t have this pocket. But number two, you are the villain because you are the leader. First and foremost, when you stepped into the leadership position, people immediately perceived you as having control and power over their career and over their situation, over their assignment, over their teaching experience, their grade level experience, the culture and climate of the school, all of it.

They see you as having this some kind of otherworldly power once you step into a leadership position and you’re kind of the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain making everything happen. And it’s determining how they feel. It’s determining how they experience things. They think you have this power over them to make them feel good or feel bad because they believe that you have the control to change things for the better or for the worse for them.

I know when I went into school leadership, my peers were like, “Bo, you’ve gone to the dark side” and teachers get really into this. There is teacher solidarity, and then there is administrative. Two teams. That’s how people view it. Some people. I like to bring this back together as one. But people told me, “Oh you’re going to the dark side.” I’m like, “The dark side?” That’s interesting that you think that.

And it does feel like that sometimes because you feel really isolated and alone. And it feels a little dark because you’re navigating in the fog sometimes. But I promise you, you’ve not gone to the dark side. You haven’t become an evil person or a bad person, and you’re not a master puppeteer who is now taking over control of people’s lives and careers and experiences.

Honestly, our teachers, they give us way too much power. They think we have way more power than we actually do. But because we have the positional authority, villains tend to be labeled as leaders and leaders are labeled as villains because in that scenario, they’re believing you possess the power and they are the opposite of that, which is a victim, which they have no power.

So unfortunately there are people who think you were the bad person, you’re the one who created an undesirable situation for them, they’re unhappy with you but they don’t want to tell you because they don’t want you to make life worse for them, so they talk behind your back, and the story they tell is through the lens of how you’ve hurt them, how you’ve made them suffer, how you’re negatively impacting them.

You’re the reason behind, get this, you become the reason behind their decisions and actions. And I find this fascinating where someone labels you as the villain, that because you did this or said this or decided this, now that’s the reason why they have to respond or react in this way. They had to make this decision. They had to say the thing or this is why they behaved the way they did.

And they justify their own behaviors, their own actions, their own words based on you, which is completely the opposite of empowerment. It’s saying you’re the puppeteer behind my decisions and actions and words and behaviors. That can’t be true.

But when people don’t want to take ownership or they don’t know how, they don’t have the tools or access to understanding their emotional experience and how to regulate those emotions, how to allow themselves to feel a certain way and validate that, and then take ownership of it and shift it into more positive energy when they don’t know how to do that. And of course they don’t because we’re not teaching it to adults and we’re not really teaching it to kids.

When they believe that they don’t have agency over their emotional experience, you do become the reason.

They can’t think of any other reason why they would feel the way they do. It’s got to be somebody else, right? And then they justify their less than beautiful behaviors because they think, it’s you. Well, that person made me feel this way, that leader made me feel this way, the principal did this, and I felt this, so I had to react this way. It’s just the way it is.

They don’t understand that they’re not experiencing life in school the way they want to, not because of you, but because of their own mindset. And look, I’m going to say something heart to heart. It hurts to be labeled as the villain. No one wants to be the bad person. We’re taught, do not be the bad person. Be the good person. It’s bad to be the bad guy, right? Bad things happen to bad people.

When we get labeled as a villain, the first thing we do is want to get back out of it as fast as possible and justify and explain ourselves or defend ourselves. We want to try and protect ourselves from the label of villain. And when somebody’s in like a villain victim mindset, it’s a very all-or-none approach, right? It’s either good or bad. It’s that person’s fault or it’s this person’s fault. And because it can’t be my fault because I’m the victim, then it has to be the villain.

So know this. Number one, it stings to be labeled as the bad person. And the first thing you’re gonna do is wanna defend yourself and protect yourself and try to explain yourself and back yourself out of it.

Number two, the next thing that you might do is, am I? And you might believe it and you might, instead of like trying to deny it, you might actually go down a rabbit hole and look for all the ways in which you messed up and did it wrong. And you can really go into a dark space yourself when you’re thinking, what did I do? When did I do that? And then you start to question yourself and doubt yourself. And you actually can convince yourself and talk yourself into believing that yes, in fact, you did do this horrible bad thing, or you made these decisions that hurt people, and it’s your fault they’re suffering, and now you want to grovel and repair and fix and apologize and try to mend and placate them because you feel like you’ve done something wrong.

But here’s the truth, here’s the middle, the land of Anne. We know that there is no such thing as all good or all bad. There is duality in every aspect of our world, in every aspect of our experience. And people are both. People have amazing attributes, positive attributes, and there are moments when we feel so good about ourselves and we’re so proud of ourselves and we feel in alignment with who we are. And then there’s moments where we’re like, oh, I can’t believe I just said that. Or, oh, I overreacted or, oh, I really let my emotions get to me or, oh, I did make that decision from a not very clean place.

Sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we get it right. Sometimes we get it wrong. There is duality in the experience. Whether you’re a leader, a teacher, a student, a parent, a district administrator, doesn’t matter what seat on the bus, we all have the duality experience in our careers. So we’re both.

So just know. Know you aren’t perfect, and they didn’t make a mistake every single time. And know you aren’t perfect and you get it right about half the time. And as leaders, what we want to do in our highest, most aligned self is we want to expand our capacity to hold space for when we get it right and have grace when people are wrong about us and be able to hold that and allow them to be wrong about us?

And we have to have the capacity to hold space when we get it wrong and know how to discern for ourselves what is our responsibility to take on and oops, we got that wrong, we need to repair, apologize, and get it right. Or when we look and say, hey, you know, my opinion of this matter is I feel like I handled it pretty well. I can see why they might misinterpret or maybe I miscommunicated, maybe I need to clarify something, but I do feel in alignment with that decision or that action or that choice of words or how I handled something. So oftentimes we allow people to tell us, you got it right or you got it wrong and just take that for face value.

Now, I’ve recently gone through some personal experiences where I was blamed for somebody else’s feelings, for their decisions, for their actions, for the outcomes that they’ve created in their own life. And I will tell you, it felt incredibly helpless. And the more that the person believed this story that they were creating for themselves, that they were a victim, and that I was their villain, the more that they would tell me, this is how you did it wrong. And this is who you were. And this is this and this and this.

My initial reaction was defensiveness. And then I sat with them. I thought, just stop, drop the defense. Just listen. Don’t get defensive and listen and listen for the truth. And when I listened, it was like, oh, there’s the other 50%.

And I’ll tell you something in those months, in the beginning, my younger self, that more immature version of me where I did not have these tools, the emotional regulation tools and allowing emotions and processing them before I speak and differentiating between reacting to my emotions and responding to them, my younger self would have gone into fight so hard. I would have gone into fight or flight, and I’m a fighter, and I would have been very defensive, protective, and argumentative.

The only time I’m not a fighter is if I’m very intimidated or afraid of somebody, or really afraid of an outcome that actually might not be safe for me physically, psychologically, financially, you know, career-wise, or professionally, anything like that. So before this work, internal work that I’ve done, like I definitely would have defended myself, I would have attacked right back, I would have thrown the blame right back at them, And I would have felt very justified in doing that.

So if that’s you, I feel you. And if you are a fighter, the hardest thing to do and the work that we do when we’re gaining emotional resiliency and regulation and maturity is that we drop the defensiveness. We don’t fight, we sit and listen, we don’t defend, we don’t explain, we don’t justify, we don’t argue, we simply listen, take it in. I have to typically, thank you for sharing, I have to go away and I have to process it in privacy. Because I’m gonna be emotional about it and I have to sit with it until I can come to terms with what I believe is true and decipher for myself what part of their feedback lands true for me and what part of their feedback does not feel like it’s my responsibility.

Now sometimes if you’re typically a fighter you might feel you don’t have the bandwidth. So when I was a principal and people were attacking me, oftentimes I just didn’t feel like I had the emotional bandwidth or desire to deal with all the blaming and the accusations. And in those moments, I would just shut down. I would let them do their thing, but I wasn’t really listening. I wasn’t receiving the feedback. I was just blanket. I kind of put it like a shield over me and I let them say what they were going to say, but I didn’t really engage in conversation at all.

And sometimes you need this approach, especially if it’s happening in real time and you can’t escape and get away, or you don’t feel like you can defend yourself, or you don’t feel like it’s safe to do that, you’re going to be in triage mode, so you might have to back down in that moment. But if you’re a person who tends to be flight risk, if you tend to freeze or flight, when you go, if you go into fight or flight and you’re a more conflict avoidant, I want you to realize that stepping away, but doing nothing with it is just the same as fighting and being defensive without listening.

It doesn’t create a long-term solution unless you’ve made an intentional decision to reflect, review, and then decide if that relationship is going to be cut off for good. You know, sometimes you step out, you freeze, you step away from a relationship, you analyze it and decide, this is the best course of action for me. I need to resign, or I need to move to another school, or I need to move to another school or I need to move to another district or personally you need to end a friendship or a relationship or something like that.

So my invitation whether you go into fight or flight is that there is a moment of pause. So for my fighters, when you want to defend yourself, you take a moment, you drop the defenses and you actually listen. You pause enough to listen and receive the feedback and then you take it with you and reflect.

My fighter flighters, if you are going into flight or freeze, like you just super conflict avoidant, you’re not going to engage in the fight, but you do have to engage in listening and receiving, just like the person who wants to defend themselves. You want to receive it and say, thank you for the feedback and then go into privacy, process how it felt, because it’s gonna feel really horrible, but then trust that you can decipher for yourself what’s true and not true about that feedback.

Because what most people do is they stay in fight or flight when somebody attacks or when somebody blames or accuses them and you’re the villain and they’re the victim. And you’re like, what the heck is going on here? You’re going to go into fight or flight and you’re going to react before you’ve had an opportunity to even contemplate whether the situation that you’re being blamed for is actually because of you or is half your fault or is even within your control.

There are things that people blame leaders for that leaders had nothing to do with. And there is something about creating a tolerance as a leader that requires you to let people be wrong about you or to misunderstand you or to think they know you but they don’t.

Think about it in terms of celebrities. There are people trolling celebrities on the internet 24-7, 365, and they say incredibly mean, hurtful, really shocking things. And those celebrities have to have the bandwidth, and I’m sure they have coaches and they have therapists and they have people to help them regulate emotionally, but they have to separate those person’s horrible, awful, ugly words from the truth of who they are. And they have to let that person hate them, let that person be wrong about them, let that person troll them.

Now, they can put boundaries in place and block the person, or if it gets really ugly, they probably could press charges. But I want you to think about that. Every level you go up, there is going to be more exposure to the possibility of being considered a villain.

And deconstructing the truth of what’s going on is really challenging because it means that you have to hold space for the duality of both the truths. You could be wrongly blamed and then you have to let people be wrong about you, or you could be accurately blamed for part of it and then you have to take ownership for that. That doesn’t feel good. Both are gut-wrenching.

So it’s hard to let people be wrong about us and continue to be confident in ourselves when people are out there falsely accusing us of something that we didn’t do or didn’t say or didn’t have power over, but they believe we do. And the flip side is super hard. It’s really hard to stand in our empowerment, in our role as leader, and say, you know what, as the leader, I got this one wrong. I did something or said something or I miscommunicated or there was an oversight or I did not take into consideration this impact, and it feels terrible.

Or perhaps you reacted to something emotionally and it impacted somebody. Or you were in your own state of fight or flight and said something hurtful, unintentionally or intentionally. And owning that and feeling the remorse of that is equally painful as to have somebody say negative things about you that aren’t true.

But here’s what I want you to know. This is the hard stuff of leadership. This is what we talk about in EPC. In EPC we hold space for you to be able to feel how you feel, to be that wrongly accused, or to have to feel the remorse, or the guilt, or the shame, or the regret of how you’ve handled something and coming up with a plan.

And let me tell you this, in either scenario, you cannot address the situation and respond with intention if you haven’t processed the emotions that come with it. You cannot regulate an emotion that you haven’t yet acknowledged and validated and processed. You just can’t. It’s still in there.

So if you avoid the feeling part and then try to go out and reconcile a wrong accusation, but you haven’t processed how you felt, it will come through energetically in your approach, and people will feel it. It won’t be a clean conversation in either way.

So, what I want to leave you with is, both are true, we have good days and hard days. We make mistakes, and we get it right.

But even when you have done something less than stellar, or something you’re not proud of, or something in hindsight you didn’t realize had an impact on someone and it was hurtful, it doesn’t mean you are a villain. There is the label, and then there’s you. Your identity is not an evil villain with the intention of waking up each morning and looking to go to school and cause all the harm that you can cause. That’s not your heart. That’s not your soul. That’s not why you’re in school leadership. So you’re not the identity of a villain. You simply are a human who made a human error or a misstep.

What they did was label you. They cast you as a character in their story. So you’re cast as a villain in their story. And when you think about it, oftentimes when you are blamed as the villain, as the bad person, it’s because they don’t feel that they have the power to be the hero in their own story. Because there’s the villain, and there’s the victim, and there’s the hero. And they’re not making themselves the hero and saying, look, I’m gonna create the experience I want regardless of this person, because I’m the star of the show. I’m the hero. No, they’re like the side character that doesn’t have a speaking part, and they’re just one of the nameless victims. They’re not even a main character in their own movie.

Because you’re the villain, you’re going around and hurting all the people, and then somebody else is going to come in and save the day and who that is in their story, I don’t know because it can’t be anybody else but them. And until they realize that and they label you, you have to see it’s just a label, it’s just a story. And it’s really a reflection of their lack of personal power and their lack of empowerment in their lives.

So you are good regardless of how other people perceive you. And your identity, your perception of you, it has to matter more than the opinions of other people. You need to learn how to discern for yourself what’s true and not true. And I will tell you this from personal experience, it’s very hard to do it in the moment. I actually don’t know how I would have done it on my own. I had a coach. I had a therapist.

I had a mentor. I had sponsors helping me. I had an army of people to help me unravel the accusations and to also take ownership of my part. And because of this intense work that I’ve done personally, I’ve developed a course on this work because I believe it’s such a profound experience of leadership. The course is going to be included in EPC, in the Empowered Principal Collaborative, so as a member of EPC you’re going to have access to this program.

But as I mentioned earlier, the spring training series for school leaders of 2025 is coming up in March. I’m giving you guys a month notice to get it on your calendars. This is a paid program. There are 8 sessions. It’s going to be held live so you will have the ability to ask questions and engage with me personally. The recordings are going to be all available and for those of you who purchase this program it will be accessible for life.

So I’m going to create a Facebook group just for people who register and I’ll upload all of the resources and all of the replays into that Facebook group and then I can engage with you in the Facebook group as you’re working through the modules. You can ask me questions, you can get coaching, but you’ll have access to that for life. So it’s a one-time fee of $555. You get access to all 8 sessions. You get access to the Facebook group and you’ll get access to me on the live training, or if you watch the replay, you can ask me questions in the Facebook group.

Okay. So for those of you who have been following the Empowered Principal podcast for quite a while, you know that I throw down my best content here, I don’t hold anything back, but I can tell you this, there is a difference between the podcast and coaching. The podcast shares overarching ideas, concepts, content, information, and it’s free because I want every principal, every district leader, every educational person on the planet to have access to these ideas. I think they’re going to change the entire experience of education. I really, really do.

So It’ll be free forever on the podcast, I give you my best here. And it’s content that you can consume, and then interpret on your own, and self-apply.

But coaching, being in EPC, or for those of you who are interested in one-on-one, it takes you deeper. It takes these concepts deeper. It helps you actively integrate them and apply them into your life daily, on the daily, and you have the support of somebody else who kind of helps you see around those blind spots.

I’m telling you, when I was going through this myself, there is no way that I could have self-coached during the intensity of the emotions I was experiencing. I couldn’t see through the fog of all of the confusion in my mind. And having a coach, having a mentor, having people to support me, having therapy, and they all serve different purposes. But the purpose of coaching, it takes the work down to a transformative level.

I believe that coaching is the processing of an expansion of your awareness, of your insights, and of your development as a human and as a leader. It’s a different experience than most people have ever experienced before. And because I believe in coaching so deeply and I believe in school leadership so profoundly, I’ve decided to start offering some of my courses in a more a la carte fashion.

So the Spring Training Series is an a la carte fashion. You don’t have to be an EPC to sign up for it. You can purchase it separately. And then if you decide, this is the most fun part. If you decide that you loved it so much, you want to join EPC, you can apply the $555 towards the cost of EPC. So you can take the Spring Training Program, see if you love it. If you love it and you want more, you can take the $555 and apply it to the cost of EPC. And then once you’re in EPC, you get access to everything.

So the link for the Spring Training Series will be in the show notes. If you have any questions, reach out. We can schedule a quick chat and I can answer any questions you have or you can just simply email me at angelakellycoaching@gmail.com. Find me on Facebook, find me on Instagram. I will be happy to message you and answer any questions that you have.

Have a beautiful week. I love you all and I appreciate the work that you’re doing. Take good care of yourselves and I’ll talk to you next week. Bye!

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit angelakellycoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.